would need to hang out at their local arcade with a pocket full of change to play anything half-decent.
Definition: Triple A Title
Triple A denotes a top of the range game that has been released as a purchasable product (often a boxed product) at a high price point (£40 in the U.K. or $60 in the U.S.). Triple A is historically the best of the best in video gaming and was where the industry saw most of its revenue. Recent developments in freemium games have seen a gradual shift in this area, however. Triple A games are by definition only made by extremely large and wealthy studios. “Call of Duty: Black Ops”, “GTA V” and “Final Fantasy XIII” are examples of Triple A titles.
A large portion of the public’s perception of video gaming and video game addiction is stuck around this period. The gamer is still seen by many as the sickly, single, male youth hunched over a console. Public opinion on video gaming is neatly captured by Warner Brothers’ “The Big Bang Theory”. This sitcom describes the plight of three young(ish) socially inept and far from Adonis-like males, all of whom are slavishly hooked on geek culture in all its forms, video games being no exception. Interestingly, the series explores gaming addiction by having Penny, the great looking blonde from across the hall, discover MMOs only to sink into a compulsive pit of greasy hair, burger-stuffing and sullen ugliness. The episode’s joke goes a long way to expose perceptions of the addicted gamer. How could a good-looking woman with common sense ever end up addicted to video games?
While the perceived image of addicts as awkward young men still bears some relation to the majority of addicts, the market has changed dramatically in the last 15 years. The nature and accessibility of games today has opened up a new wealth of consumers who use games in a whole new range of ways, many of these being less than healthy. I saw one lady in her 40s who struggled to control how much she played on her mobile phone. This individual by no means fit the stereotypical description of the gaming addict, yet she described the game as having ‘taken away [her] self-control’. She depicted herself as wanting to:
“...play it at any opportunity I had, any time I had a spare minute, and sometimes even when I didn’t. When my friends pointed out that I was playing it in a pub during a night out I realised that things had gone very wrong.”
These developments in gaming have new kinds of gamers; some of them are addicted in new ways. We are, as ever, struggling to catch up with the changes.
“Flappy Bird” is perhaps one of the games that most powerfully accentuates this enormous shift in how gaming technology is being used. Ten years ago it would be hard to believe that within a decade, a single, unknown independent developer in Vietnam would end up pulling his solo project from the market because he was concerned that his game, bringing in $50,000 a day, was proving too addictive. Compare a game such as “ Flappy Bird” to a Triple A game such as “The Last of Us”, a game released in the same year with armies of staff, years of production and whose background code dwarfs that of “Flappy Bird” thousands of times over. There is clearly a colossal gulf between the production standard of these titles and yet these smaller, infinitely cheaper games are weighing in with heavyweight profits. While “The Last of Us” was a profitable game, many Triple A studios, such as THQ, that were flourishing some 10 years ago, have now disappeared. The market has greatly diversified to benefit the new wave of ‘casual’ games, taking much of the power away from the former giants of the industry and drastically changing who games and how they game.
This is all hardly surprising. “Flappy Bird” made a lot of money but its income is paltry compared to the unthinkable profit of other similarly simplistic games on the market at the moment. “Candy Crush Saga” is and has been for some time, the most astonishing example of the triumph of the (comparatively) small-budget, mobile game. This game’s developers – the U.K.-based King – were at one point reportedly pulling in over $3.5 million a day from a 2D game where you push sweets about. That’s far over 50 times what “Flappy Bird” was doing (BGR 2014). And he thought his game was worryingly addictive. So what happened?
The Rise of Casual Gaming
Today’s gaming market has split into what is loosely referred to as casual and hardcore gaming – definitions that have further sub-divided and merged into a wide plethora of different gaming styles. This has led to a diversifying in the ways that people play; changes that even the game design industry struggles to keep up with. Most notably, these changes are created by the rise of mobile gaming and the free-to-play model.
Definition: Mobile Gaming
All gaming that is carried out on a portable device. While this primarily refers to smartphones and tablets, it can also include handhelds such as the PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS. Mobile gaming offers a far higher level of access to gamers and is best suited to short bursts of play. Consequently games designed for these platforms tend to favour more frivolous, snack-able formats.
To clarify the language here: hardcore gaming is typically on a console or a PC, involves playing for several hours, sometimes days at a time, and normally centres on some kind of killing/violence/carnage in a fantasy or military setting. This is still largely the domain of men, with only around a fifth of such games being played by women (Williams 2009). Hardcore games include the likes of “Call of Duty”, “Skyrim” and “Titanfall” and are, certainly historically, a realm dominated by the Triple A titles.
Casual games, on the other hand, are typically played on mobile devices or through internet browsers. These are frequently disposable, colourful games that centre on nurturing, building and decorating as well as puzzle and quiz games. “Farmville”, “Clash of Clans” and “Candy Crush Saga” are all arguably examples of this broad style of game. Recent reports suggest that women have taken the lead in this market, playing marginally more than men (Sky News 2013). A telltale sign of casual gamers is that they can spend hours playing such games and still not self-identify as gamers. To them, a couple of minutes here and there pushing sweets in “Candy Crush” doesn’t equate to being a gamer, even when a couple of minutes here and there totals more than a fifth of their waking hours.
Mobiles have, in an incredibly short space of time, completely changed the experience of being either in a city or on public transport. Mobile gaming forms an important part of that shift. Phones are out in force wherever you go, and a great many of those screens are busy housing some form of video game. My gamer’s eye is always caught by the distinctive green expanse of someone tending to their clan in “Clash of Clans” or the ponderous swipes of a sweet pusher.
In The Fix, a somewhat melodramatic ‘we’re-all-doomed’ discussion on addiction by Telegraph writer Damian Thompson, is the astute observation that a crucial ingredient for addiction is access – and phones are all about access. You can push sweets on the toilet, under the meeting table, in bed, over your lover’s shoulder, even in a real sweet shop. Thompson argues that our evolutionary impulses to seek out rewarding behaviour backfire on us badly in situations where there is no limit to the supply of rewards. He cites the use of gin in 18th-century England, heroin use in Vietnam and sugary foods in modern, Western society, all instances where we are missing a natural ceiling to how much ‘goodness’ we can get and are subsequently going all out in getting far too much for us to handle (Thompson 2013).
By this reckoning, mobile gaming will be off the charts. As of yet, there is evidence that mobile gaming is hugely popular, but little to say that it is, as yet, proving dangerously addictive – two very different things as we will discuss later. At the same time, the reports of people sinking vast quantities of money and time into seemingly cute and innocuous mobile games are slowly trickling in to form a new, bigger picture of gaming addiction (Rogers 2014).
There are a couple of developments in the world of mobile gaming that are particularly cruel in their
